if we had won the EL then it'd had be the greatest season in my lifetime as a rangers fan, but we didn't, we're meant to be big time club and we are surppose to win big time games, and they did not come bigger than wed night, and we failed, whatever we felt on the way to that final, the end result was we lost, like Gio said, no one will remember who the losers were (outside us).
to class winning just the scottish cup as a sucessful season is not the Rangers I was brought up with. folks keep saying "remember were we came from" which is fair enough, but when do we leave that thinking behind and start thinking bigger and demand better on all fronts? is this season's run a fluke or do we as fans have the right to demand similar for next season?
A sucessful season for me going forward is winning the league and doing well in europe, not one or the other but both, I think Gio sees us as a club that should be consistant performers in europe year after year, and the league will take care of itself, this season I'll give him the leeway that this is not his team
Post of the thread and the following wee passage sums up my feelings on the subject.
''folks keep saying "remember were we came from" which is fair enough, but when do we leave that thinking behind and start thinking bigger and demand better on all fronts?''
For me this 'Just nine years ago we were picking balls out of hedges in Brechin' is now a comfort blanket, a catch all, go to phrase for losing.
We were absolutely dross today. - Ah but remember where we were just nine years ago.
That was absolutely criminal that we dropped two points today - Hey remember, just nine years ago we were playing in parks with hedges behind the touchline.
It happened, so we get on with it. Although, if you don't want to forgive or forget and I'm one of them, the solution is easy. Target the clubs that put the boot into us one-by-one and starve them of money by boycotting their two home league games a season against us.
In many ways this 'Baws-in-hedges-at-Brechin' retort remind me of Willie Allison in his book, Rangers, The New Era, which hit the bookstores in 1966.
Speaking of our elimination at the hands of Inter Milan in the q/f of the 1964/65 EC he says;
''It was little compensation to to be told by the World Champions that we were the finest British side they had encountered or that we were the first British team to score in Milan in a European Cup match. Nor did it ease our pain to know Inter were much more than just another club side, and had been built at fantastic expense from some of the world's greatest exponents.
This was possibly because the financial set-up in Italy and other Continental countries is vastly different from what we know of them in Scotland.'' Also ''We play the same game, but do so in vastly different cash-worlds.''
In other words, an excuse back then for us not being able to match the best in Europe.
Which is all well and good till we realise sickeningly that just a year after Allison's words were in the public domain another mob from Glasgow operating under the exact same circumstances as us, rammed those words down our throats.
We should all be proud of what we have achieved in the last decade and all the obstacles we have had to overcome and are still facing to keep rising above the quagmire that is yahoo run Scottish football and of course the financial disparity between the 'big four/five' and the rest of us that is bigger than it has ever been.
It should not be used as a reason to justify accepting defeat, a comfort blanket if you will for standing still.
As for me, I don't know what kind of Rangers fan I am, or have become because like most, the last decade has probably changed me out of all recognition. However, I'd like to think that I will never come to the conclusion that only winning a Scottish Cup constitutes a successful season at Ibrox.
